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EU Leader Says English Is Losing Importance (politico.eu)
An anonymous reader writes: Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, opted to deliver a speech in French on Friday morning because he said "English is losing importance" in Europe. He gave the comments, which are unlikely to mend fences after a war of words between Brussels and London over Brexit negotiations, at the "State of the Union" conference in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio -- an annual event for European dignitaries. Juncker said he was opting for French because "slowly but surely English is losing importance in Europe and France has elections this Sunday and I want the French people to understand what I am saying about the importance of the EU." He spoke in English.
Some software is pretty good from France. VeraCrypt is a good example of something well made.
He is not really French, he is from Luxembourg where French is one of 3 official languages. This is like calling an Irishman a Brit, or an Englishman. Only 16% of the population are native French speakers, although 96% of the population is fluent in French. The primary native language is Luxembourgish, which is closer to German than French.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Luxembourg
In accordance with the EU population, the most widely spoken mother tongue is German (16%), followed by Italian and English (13% each), French (12%), then Spanish and Polish (8% each).
After Brexit, it will be worse. It's true that English is used as a second language by a significant portion of the population, but the same can be said for many other languages, given that much of the population speaks 2 or more languages. Interestingly, the UK is among the lowest ranking countries when it comes to being able to speak in a second language.
Current EU population is 504 million. The UK is 64 million, of which 88% (56 million) speak English as their mother tongue. After taking out those 56 million, the number of people who speak English as their mother tongue in the EU drops to only a few million out of the remaining 404 million population. In other words, less than 1%.
Source
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
But does it really? Let's remove the UK from the EU. The remaining population: Are they more likely to speak English or french?
Outside of France, Belgium and Luxembourg which shared common territories recently enough that the language is adopted in the country who else speaks French:
Netherlands 29%
Roumania 17%
Ireland 17%
Italy 16%
Portugal 15%
Germany 14%
Austria 11%
The rest 10%
So way to go, your speech was not understood by the vast majority of the population. Now let's do the same thing to English.
Ireland 95%
Netherlands 90%
Sweeden 86%
Denmark 86%
Austria 70%
Finland 70%
Slovenia 59%
Germany 56%
Belgium 52%
I'm not going to list all the rest, but not a single country in the EU has less than 20% proficiency in English.
English is not the #1 language in the EU, even before Brexit"
In accordance with the EU population, the most widely spoken mother tongue is German (16%), followed by Italian and English (13% each), French (12%), then Spanish and Polish (8% each).
Check your stat definitions before using them to make a point. Those are 'native tongue' percentages. 51% speak English.
The keywords are irrelevant. It's simple enough to write a keyword translator. I wrote one that translated BASIC from a custom set of french keywords to English way back in the mid-80s for a friend. If you can't write a translator, or even just a series of macros or a regex or a perl script to do the job, you need to realize TIMTOWTDI.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
is that once the UK leaves, English will no longer be an official language of any UE member country. Ireland declared Irish and Malta declared Maltese as their official language for EU purposes, even if their people speak mostly English.
The guy is from Luxembourg, not France.
If you believe that.... Some of us white anglo looking folks running around the USA DO understand Spanish.... And yes, I've overheard some of your conversations you thought where private...
Personally, I consider it rude to choose to speak in a language to obscure your conversation from those around you and try not to do that when I can, but again, I suppose that's not a typical white anglo's attitude either..
The question wasn't " what percentage of EU-27 citizens speak French vs English as their mother tounge". If 10% speak French, and 10% speak German, and 10% speak language x, and 10% speak language y, etc. but 70% of them also speak English, then English matters more as a shared language.
Quebec's Language Act
Doing Business in Quebec
Website in English?
If your trademark isn't french, add french to it
Language Police
C'est l'état de la grenouille. Mort à la liberté~~
Oh yeah, brave France and Britain, ignoring the takeover of Austria and Czechoslovakia, but boy howdy, Poland was the last straw! That dereliction of duty is what wiped out France in a matter of days and forced Britain to retreat because none of them were prepared for what had been right in front of their face since 1936.
World War II didn't have to happen, and it happened because France and the UK didn't do their job of enforcing the treaties and pacts they constructed to keep Germany in line post-World War I.